Computer data centers (data centers), comprise computer servers in a high density setting that expend a significant amount of electricity, resulting in the generation of a significant amount of heat. Data centers, also referred to as server farms, can range in size from that of a small room to a facility with hundreds of thousands of square feet of space for the housing of tens of thousands of computer servers and related infrastructure. The computer servers in a data center run constantly and require certain redundancy of supporting power and cooling infrastructure. Computer servers, and other electronic equipment in a data center, consume a lot of electricity which results in generation of waste heat. Heat, if not removed, can result in overheating and equipment failure, and thus to maintain their operational requirements a ventilation system is employed in which cool air (or other data center cooling fluid) is circulated through the server's electronic equipment, removing the excess heat.
As data centers have become larger in the last few years, electrical efficiency of the data center has become increasingly important. Data centers that have been built with a power requirement of over 30 mega-watts. Computer servers typically consume the bulk of the power load with most of the remaining consumption being related to the cooling equipment needed to remove the waste heat from the data center.
As the need for computing power grows, super data centers have emerged spanning across multiple data centers to provide cloud based computing platforms by providing shared computer processing resources to computers and other devices on demand. Consequently, the need of data centers, for both private and public based cloud computing has continued to increase. However, the data center dissipated heat is generally released to the environment, thus wasting the thermal energy carried within. Therefore, what is needed are systems, devices, methods, and techniques that improve the efficiency of a data center by recovering and utilizing wasted thermal energy dissipated from a data center and/or other sources.